- Federal judge blocks US sanctions against UN rapporteur Francesca Albanese
Source: Al Jazeera [Qatari state media]
“A federal judge has temporarily blocked United States sanctions against Francesca Albanese, a United Nations expert on the occupied Palestinian territory. UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese was sanctioned in July 2025 after she publicly criticised Washington’s policy on Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza. Albanese’s husband and daughter filed a lawsuit in February against the Trump administration over the sanctions. It argued that the sanctions were an effort to punish Albanese for bringing attention to Israel’s rights abuses against Palestinians. In his court order on Wednesday, US District Judge Richard Leon granted a preliminary injunction against the sanctions. He found that the Trump administration sought to regulate her speech because of the ‘idea or message expressed.'” (05/14/26)
- Honda records its first-ever annual loss on a costly EV strategy
Source: Seattle Times
“Honda racked up a 423.9 billion yen ($2.7 billion) loss Thursday, the first-ever full year loss for the Japanese automaker, acknowledging heavy costs for its electric-vehicle plans, stemming from President Donald Trump’s pro-U.S. [sic] policies. The Japanese automaker said losses related to its EV operations are estimated to total 2.5 trillion yen ($16 billion), incurred mostly in the fiscal year just ended and the current fiscal year. Analysts say Honda Motor Co. might have been too ambitious too fast, when many markets weren’t ready. As a result, Honda abandoned many of its plans for EV models, including those in the works in a joint venture with Sony Corp.” (05/14/26)
- Apple backs Google after EU orders Android be opened up to AI rivals
Source: Engadget
“Apple is on Google’s side when it comes the latter’s criticisms against the European Union’s proposals which would give third-party AI services the same level of access to Android that Gemini has. The European Commission has been taking steps to ensure that Google complies with the rules of the Digital Markets Act (DMA). In January, it told the company that it has to give external AI assistants the same access to Android its own technology has and to hand over ‘anonymized ranking, query, click and view data held by Google Search’ to rival search engines. … According to Reuters, Apple echoed Google’s statement that allowing competing AI services complete access to Android would undermine European users’ privacy. It would, for instance, allow them to interact with the apps people use to send emails, order food or share photos.” (05/14/26)
https://www.engadget.com/2172631/apple-comments-back-google-eu-ai-order-android/
- Latvia: Prime minister resigns after controversy over stray Ukrainian drones
Source: ABC News
“Latvian center-right Prime Minister Evika Silina announced her resignation on Thursday, after the Progressives Party, her left-leaning coalition partner, pulled support from the government and left her without a majority. Her resignation came after Latvia’s Defense Minister Andris Spruds, from the Progressives Party, was forced to resign last week over the government’s handling of multiple incidents involving stray drones suspected to be from Ukraine crossing into Latvian territory. Silina said at the time Spruds had lost her trust and that of the public.” (05/14/26)
- NY: Man Found Guilty in Chinese “Secret Police Station” Case
Source: US News & World Report
“A New York man was found guilty on Wednesday of acting as an unregistered agent of the Chinese government after a trial over federal prosecutors’ allegations that he operated a ‘secret police station’ on behalf of Beijing in Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood. Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn said Lu Jianwang, 64, should have alerted the U.S. Attorney General that he was a Chinese agent when he helped open the so-called police station in 2022. They also said he helped China’s government locate a pro-democracy activist living in California. Lu was arrested in April 2023. He had pleaded not guilty to the three felony charges he faced: conspiracy to act as an unregistered foreign agent, acting as an unregistered agent of China, and obstruction of justice. A jury in Brooklyn federal court reached the verdict after a weeklong trial.” (05/13/26)
- Mexico: Sheinbaum denies CIA involvement in assassination of cartel operative
Source: CBC News [Canadian state media]
“Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said Wednesday that reports claiming the CIA was involved in a recent targeted assassination outside Mexico City were ‘fictions the size of the universe.’ CNN and the New York Times reported Tuesday that the CIA was involved in the targeted car bombing of a mid-level Sinaloa cartel member on March 28. … Mexico’s Secretary of Security and Citizen Protection Omar Harfuch immediately denied the reports Tuesday evening in a post on social media platform X. CIA spokesperson Liz Lyons followed Harfuch’s post with her own carrying the agency’s official denial.” (05/13/26)
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/mexico-cia-sinaloa-cartel-member-bombing-9.7198270
- NE: Powell wins Democratic primary for top US House battleground district
Source: NBC News
“Political organizer Denise Powell has won the Democratic nomination in Nebraska’s 2nd District, NBC News projects, emerging from a tough primary fight in one of her party’s top opportunities to flip a swing seat this year. Powell narrowly defeated state Sen. John Cavanaugh in a race that featured five other Democratic candidates on the ballot. Powell had 39% to Cavanaugh’s 37% in the primary with about 90% of the expected vote tallied. She will advance to a general election matchup against Omaha City Council member Brinker Harding, who ran unopposed for the Republican nomination. … Nebraska’s 2nd District has been a top target for Democrats for several election cycles, but GOP Rep. Don Bacon’s decision to retire at the end of his term has renewed enthusiasm among Democrats hoping to win his seat.” (05/13/26)
- Ship reported seized off UAE coast, heading toward Iran
Source: Associated Press
“A ship anchored off the east coast of the United Arab Emirates has been seized and is heading toward Iranian territorial waters, the British military said Thursday. The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations center said it received reports that the vessel was taken by unauthorized personnel while anchored 38 nautical miles (70 kilometers, 44 miles) northeast of the UAE port of Fujairah, near the Strait of Hormuz. … UKMTO did not name the ship and said it is investigating. There were no immediate claims of responsibility for the seizure.” (05/14/26)
- Ukraine: Rescuers search rubble of Kyiv flats after massive Russian strikes kill two
Source: BBC News [UK state media]
“Two people have been killed and children are among dozens wounded after Russia launched a massive wave of strikes against Ukraine overnight, officials have said. Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko said it was an ‘especially difficult night for Kyiv,’ where rescuers are searching through the rubble of a residential building after a combined missile and drone attack on the capital. At least 40 people have been injured, including two children, the city’s mayor said. Some 31 of those are being treated in hospital. It marks the third day in a row Ukraine has reported deaths, as Moscow ramps up its assault after a three-day ceasefire expired on Monday.” (05/14/26)
- Philippines: ICC suspect flees Senate
Source: Al Jazeera [Qatari state media]
“The Philippine Senate President says that a politician wanted by the International Court (ICC) was no longer in the Senate building where he had been taking refuge, fearing his arrest. Senator Ronald ‘Bato’ dela Rosa, the former national police chief and top enforcer of former President Rodrigo Duterte’s bloody ‘war on drugs,’ has been under Senate protection and is wanted for crimes against humanity, the same charges Duterte is accused of. ‘The sergeant-at-arms has confirmed that he is no longer in the building,’ Senate President Alan Peter Cayetano told reporters on Thursday. The announcement comes a day after gunfire rang out at the Senate, where dela Rosa had been holed up. Confusion and chaos filled the legislature as people inside scrambled for cover on Wednesday, hours after dela Rosa, had appealed to his supporters on social media to mobilise and said law enforcement agents were planning on arresting him.” (05/14/26)
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/5/14/philippine-politician-wanted-by-icc-flees-senate
- Senate confirms Fed chair nominee Kevin Warsh, ending standoff over Powell probe
Source: ABC News
“The Senate voted Wednesday to confirm Federal Reserve chair nominee Kevin Warsh, clearing the way for Warsh to replace central bank head Jerome Powell when his term ends later this week. The Senate confirmed Warsh by a vote of 54 to 45. Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., was the lone Democrat to vote in favor of Warsh. The vote comes weeks after the Department of Justice moved to drop its criminal probe into Powell. Before that, Warsh had faced a bipartisan stonewall in the Senate Banking Committee over the investigation. The probe into Powell focused on alleged false testimony to Congress about an office renovation. Powell, whose term ends on Friday, called the investigation a politically motivated effort to influence interest-rate policy.” (05/13/26)
https://abcnews.com/Business/senate-confirms-fed-chair-nominee-kevin-warsh-ending/story?id=132875814
- Socialists Are Reaping a Bountiful Political Harvest while They Create Havoc
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by William L Anderson“There is no doubt that socialists are doing very well in the current electoral climate. Zohran Mamdani’s recent victory in the New York City mayoral election has electrified the socialist movement across the country, which also includes the election of Katie Wilson as mayor of Seattle. … Indeed, Bernie Sanders lost narrowly in the 2016 and 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, and it certainly is not beyond the imagination to say American voters might well have sent him to the White House in either of those elections, had he won the nomination. … One might think, given the electoral successes of leftwing Democrats, that their policies have been successful in transforming the economic and social landscapes of the cities and states where they govern. Think again.” (05/14/26)
- How to Lower Gas Prices
Source: Common Sense
by Paul Jacob“Gasoline prices have skyrocketed. The Iran War is to blame, but the President has not been able to bring it to an end. Still, he has offered a small fix. A federal gas tax suspension! In its favor, this temporary measure would offer some relief. In addition, the federal government shouldn’t be attaching an excise to fuel sales anyway. The states already burden our fuel bills with their own taxes. … Cutting off a source of revenue would increase the deficit, of course. But there is a simple solution to that: spend less.” (05/14/26)
- Are Democrats trying to out-hawk Trump on China to spite him?
Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Connor Echols“The president has actually opened the door to rethinking ties with Beijing, but partisan politics are preventing some lawmakers from walking on through.” (05/14/26)
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/trump-china-deal-democrats/
- Today’s AIs Show the Marginal Revolution’s Unfinished Business
Source: Cobden Centre
by Joakim Book“AIs excel at pattern recognition, correlation spotting, and out-of-sample prediction from vast datasets; they do not deduce the impossibility of economic calculation under socialism, the coordinative power of market prices under private property, or why fiat results in boom-bust cycles or all manner of unproductive financialization schemes.” (05/14/26)
https://www.cobdencentre.org/2026/05/todays-ais-show-the-marginal-revolutions-unfinished-business/
- Land, Law, and Constitutional Overreach
Source: Law & Liberty
by John O McGinnis“Historians regularly assail ‘law office history.’ But they can be guilty of writing ‘history department jurisprudence.'” (05/14/26)
https://lawliberty.org/book-review/land-law-and-constitutional-overreach/
- The Perfect Storm for ADHD Overdiagnosis
Source: Cato Institute
by Adam Omary and Jeffrey A Singer“The sharp increase in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnoses — nearly doubling among American children between 1997 and 2022, and more than tripling among adults from 2012 to 2023 — has been chalked up to better screening, increased awareness, and the corrosive effects of smartphones and social media on developing brains. None of these factors holds up well under scrutiny. The diagnostic category itself has been steadily widened by the institutions that define it and the financial structure that rewards every participant for applying the ADHD label.” (05/13/26)
https://www.cato.org/commentary/perfect-storm-adhd-overdiagnosis
- A Central Bank Digital Currency Isn’t an Immediate Threat
Source: Exiled Policy
by Jason Pye“Critics are right that a digital dollar could be another surveillance tool, but the Federal Reserve likely needs Congress to authorize it.” (05/13/26)
https://exiledpolicy.substack.com/p/a-central-bank-digital-currency-isnt
- What do they fear?
Source: The Price of Liberty
by Nathan Barton“The more power we have, the more we fear losing that power. However little we have. If, for example, we enjoy weekends without having to work at a 9-to-5 job, and have our employer tell us otherwise? (… if we want to keep our job.) The idea of losing power over our own schedule and our daily lives causes worry, even fear. How much more those who have much greater power, whether it is the power of wealth or the power of controlling others.” (05/13/26)
- Why Walgreens Gives Up
Source: Common Sense
by Paul Jacob“Walgreens closes another store in another crime-ridden Chicago neighborhood, so of course folks get mad at Walgreens. The defeated Chatham store, closing its doors on June 4, suffered a million dollars in losses last year, citing theft rates ‘far above company average’ — according to one astute observer on X. … Local leaders ‘and residents’ are rallying ‘to demand’ that the chain either keep this particular store open or give money to healthcare organizations in the area. Hey, I’d like Walgreens to give me money to help me with stuff too. I wouldn’t think of demanding it though. Or demanding that Walgreens stores operate at a loss.” (05/13/26)
https://thisiscommonsense.org/2026/05/13/walgreens-gives-up/
- Political Islam Is Rank Populism That Perverts a Fundamentally Liberal Faith
Source: The UnPopulist
by Mohammed Nosseir“The Western right’s smearing of the entire religion and the left’s romanticization of it are both misguided.” (05/13/26)
https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/political-islam-is-rank-populism
- The Decline and Fall of Human Agency
Source: Law & Liberty
by Jeffrey Bilbro“Whenever a new technology comes down the pike, some people identify themselves as agents who can benefit from it, and others see themselves as victims who will be harmed by it. Agents get excited about how AI will enable them to get work done more easily and quickly. They can generate code, whip out targeted ad campaigns, analyze data, cheat on quizzes, respond to customer inquiries, or eliminate military targets. Victims fear that AI will empower the systems that already constrain or oppress them. They will suffer from software bugs or security vulnerabilities, be inundated with AI slop, get surveilled by governments and corporations, have their relationships infected by mistrust, get lost in labyrinthine bureaucracies, or be eliminated (perhaps erroneously) by an autonomous drone. This distinction helps make sense of the wildly varying responses to AI technologies: Agents generate utopian hype narratives while victims succumb to doomer fears.” (05/13/26)
https://lawliberty.org/forum/the-decline-and-fall-of-human-agency/
- Federal Courts, Local Wrongs: How Qualified Immunity Gave Us Lawless Law Enforcement
Source: Liberalism.org
by Radley Balko“At the state and local level, police officers (and government employees in general) are protected from lawsuits by a policy called qualified immunity. The policy isn’t in the Constitution, nor was it ever enacted by Congress. It’s a legal fiction that the U.S. Supreme Court invented from whole cloth. In fact, qualified immunity’s very existence cuts against the clear intent of the Fourteenth Amendment. … We commonly hear that ‘ignorance of the law is no excuse’ — you can’t defend yourself from criminal charges by claiming that you didn’t know that what you did was illegal. Qualified immunity not only provides an excuse for law enforcement officers when they violate someone’s constitutional rights, it’s an incentive for police agencies to keep their officers ignorant of how courts expect officers to treat members of the public.” (04/13/26)
- No good reason to reject liberty
Source: Eastern New Mexico News
by Kent McManigal“People find many reasons to reject liberty. Fear. Envy. Ignorance. Tradition. In fact, there are probably as many reasons to reject liberty as there are people on this planet. Those whose careers depend on violating liberty will use any excuse they are handed. If they use envy, they can impose socialism and raise taxes on the rich. They can make people believe they have a ‘right’ to things that others must work to provide them. It can never be your right to enslave others! Using ignorance, political criminals lie and hope that too few notice to do anything about it. It’s how we get things like ‘assault weapon’ rules, carbon credits, and the war on (some) drugs. They also combine ignorance with envy, so those cheated in the brain department will demand to be coddled to dumb down society so that no one feels stupid.” (05/13/26)
- The Trump Hustle: Distraction, Deception and the Heist of the American Economy
Source: CounterPunch
by John Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead“Call it what it is: a heist. The corruption, cronyism, and self-dealing that now define the American government—under Donald Trump in particular—amount to a slow-motion stick-up carried out in broad daylight. But here’s the trick: it’s a heist hidden behind spectacle. The Trump administration is flooding the stage with noise so ‘we the people’ don’t notice what’s happening behind the curtain. We’re being manipulated into watching the wrong thing. The distractions are part of the plan to rob us blind. You don’t have to look far to see how the con works. Nowhere is the hustle more obvious than in how the presidency itself is being used.” (05/13/26)
- Kibbe on Liberty, episode 385
Source: Free the People
“Grading the Trump Administration on Gun Rights | Guest: Dudley Brown.” (05/13/26)
- The Science of Politics, 05/13/26
Source: Niskanen Center
“Political inequality isn’t responsible for economic inequality.” (05/13/26)
https://www.niskanencenter.org/political-inequality-isnt-responsible-for-economic-inequality
- Antiwar News with Dave DeCamp, 05/13/26
Source: Antiwar.com
“Israel Bombs Cars on Major Lebanese Highway, US Surging Military Flights Near Cuba, and More.” (05/13/26)
- Make It Make Sense, 05/13/26
Source: Washington Post
“Has the U.S. lost the Iran war?” (05/13/26)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/make-it-make-sense/has-the-us-lost-the-iran-war/
- The Kyle Anzalone Show, 05/13/26
Source: Libertarian Institute
“We sit down with Nick Cleveland-Stout of the Quincy Institute (and a writer at Drop Site News) to track a sweeping Israeli influence campaign in the United States that goes far beyond the usual Capitol Hill lobbying.” (05/13/26)
- The Political Orphanage, 05/13/26
Source: The Political Orphanage
“Fighting Crime Like an Economist.” (05/13/26)
https://politicalorphanage.libsyn.com/fighting-crime-like-an-economist